Lincoln's Second Inaugural

Whenever the blues set in, I return to those sure endorphin stimulators, like reading the opening paragraph of "A Farewell to Arms" or some other old friend in print and I keep going until I fall asleep.

One of those in the pantheon of magic mind blowers is Lincoln's Second Inaugural address, which I re read last night and saw something in it, I hadn't before.

You can get caught up in the poetry and lyricism so that you miss an important point--Lincoln, who is so direct and the master of clarity and economy, obfuscates unashamedly at crucial points throughout this wonderful oration.

He starts out by recalling his first address, but early on he uses unnecessarily complex sentence structure: "on the occasion corresponding to this four years ago" rather than, "at the first inaugural." 
He has already reversed the normal associations of words in phrases, by saying the the course of the war "absorbed the attention" and "engrossed the energies" of the nation, rather than the ordinary "engrossed the attention" and "absorbed the energies." That little trick is simply a way of keeping things fresh, but  why the ornate "occasion corresponding to four years ago?"

Then he addresses what has happened between the first and second inaugural addresses.
He marches through the answer to the "what" question most masterfully, and with an authority nobody but Lincoln could muster. What happened to bring on the war?  Well, he says, there were these people called slaves who constituted a "peculiar interest"  and "all knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war."
Thus, he puts to rest for the ages all the possible revisionist history which might follow, about "The Lost Cause" or "economic forces" causing the war.  Like Eisenhower touring the concentration camps at the end of WWII, ordering films and photographs to document what was found there, both leaders knew that in ensuing generations some would try to change the story, and both took care to establish the truth, undeniable, inalienable.  What happened cannot be in dispute. The war was, ultimately, about slavery. And this comes from the man who tried to convince himself and his countrymen, at the outset that slavery was not the cause, that Union was the cause.

But it when he gets around to trying to answer the "why" question that he gets particularly un Lincoln, and very obscure.

Basically, what he says is it may be that God may have looked at slavery as so grievous offense against His will that he required that each drop of blood drawn by the lash should be repaid by one drawn by the sword and since this has been going on for 250 years, a lot of blood was going to be required.
But here's the thing, as much or more blood was shed by the agents of ending slavery, i.e. the soldiers of the Union army, as was shed by the defenders of slavery. So how does one explain why the agents of retribution should be so afflicted? The only possible explanation, the only possible inference would be that somehow the North was just as guilty as the South in the institution of slavery.
Lincoln, of course, would never be so impolitic as to suggest the North deserved punishment, but that is what he very clearly is suggesting.
How had the North been guilty? By tolerating slavery, I suppose. And the Northern mills used Southern cotton.

There is also that delicious aside,"It may seem strange that any men should dare ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces,"* by which he is saying it might seem strange that men should ask a just God for help with acquiring wealth and sustenance by enslaving other men.  This remark follows his observation that men of the South invoked God to justify their "Cause," and they read the same Bible and prayed to the same God as those in the North. And he says that since both appealed to the same God for help, only one side could be right and only one side could get the answer it was looking for.  How the South could possibly expect help from a just God strikes Lincoln as perplexing but then he slides into that humble mode he did so well, "judge not lest we be judged."
So Lincoln, ever so delicately makes the case that the South was simply wrong in asserting there was any moral justification for slavery. What he is doing is to say, well, they've had their answer from God, but we here in the North won't gloat over it.

Grant, of course, was not so generous, when he said that his opponent, Robert E. Lee had suffered enormously and with grace for the "Cause" but it was the worst cause anyone ever fought for.

But what of that question, which Lincoln dances around?  Why should the North, the agent of the avenging angel have been made to suffer so? 

It is here Lincoln obfuscates and lapses into allusion to Biblical phrases, which, in all of Western literature are so obscure as to allow almost any interpretation, and so he can hide behind the ambiguity.

The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Basically, he says, "it's a mystery." Shall we question God? Do we say he's being inconsistent in his divine attributes and he talks about "believers in a living God."

Lincoln never really says he is such a believer. After his son, Willie died, he asked why such an innocent should be made to suffer. Then he saw innocents by the millions suffer from the war. 

He had no answer, really, to the why question. He could only answer the what question with certainly and clarity, and he left the believers their beliefs, and says, let's just hope to move past all this and bind up our wounds.

In this, we hear President Obama, who was not interested in chasing down the nasties who brought us to the brink of economic collapse; he was only interested in getting past it.
Unfortunately, that led to the emergence of a very real nasty.
What the country needs now is a U.S. Grant, who has the moral authority to take us to a better place.
What we've got is anyone's guess.


*This I learned after posting is from Genesis where God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden and tells them they must obtain their bread from the sweat of their own faces. Lincoln read the Bible, unlike me. I did not recognized it, but I was struck by the oddity of the expression.

A Time Like No Other: When Men Were Men

Having suffered through daily tweets from President Heel Spurs, the Phantom discovered last Sunday a Bpston Globe article about Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and was transfixed, as he read, discovering Higginson had fought in the Civil War, survived and in 1917 he faced down the cries of "patriots" who decried the German conductor of Higginson's beloved orchestra, when the conductor neglected to play the national anthem before a concert. 

Colonel Higginson

These 3 men lived through a truly trans-formative period in American history: they were part of the most convulsive time in our nation's history, it's most violent and extreme time, and they saw World War One, or at least its advent, and listened to the drumbeat of pseudo patriotism and saw it  from the perspective of true patriots.

If I were given a budget to produce a TV series and total license, I would chose this time, the lifespan of these three men to illuminate what America is all about, the best and the worst, the most intense conflict and the clearest vision of the American experiment.

This was a time in American history when there was intense anti-immigrant feeling toward Germans, who had previously become fully integrated into American society, but during the first World War, became an despised group.  

O.W. Holmes

During WWI,  criticism of the government or the war was outlawed and another Civil War veteran, Oliver Wendell Holmes, issued a scathing dissent in a Supreme Court case which sent several men to prison for 20  years for issuing pamphlets (in Yiddish, of all things) criticizing the war and calling for resistance.

Reading about these men as they progressed through life to a time when "patriotism" no longer meant facing hostile fire which ripped through your body, but simply required brave speech, or singing the national anthem brings  our current state of affairs into stark relief.

General Chamberlain

Another contemporary, Joshua Chamberlain, of Maine, who played a pivotal role in saving the battle of Gettysburg, was wounded so gravely at Petersburg he was given a death bed promotion to brigadier general, but he defied expectations and lived to be present at Appomattox, where Grant  gave him the honor of receiving the surrender of the Confederate army.

These 3 New Englanders were contemporaries, born between 1834 and 1843 and each lived into the first part of the 20th century and played significant roles launching modern America into the American Century. 

Like most human beings, they each took stands we may now criticize, but on balance, each was heroic  in ways Donald Trump can never hope to be.

Higginson, for all his clear eyed appreciation of what real patriotism was--he supported his German conductor and never asked him to play the national anthem--he also supported a movement to prevent Southern and Eastern Europeans from immigrating into the US.

Chamberlain supported capital punishment, but he also opposed creating a special police force to enforce Prohibition.

Justice Holmes 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, was the most complex in his moral positions.  While he decried the silencing of opposition to war during times of war, he also saw the First Amendment Freedom of Speech as being limited: "Freedom of speech does not give you the right to cry 'Fire' in a crowded theater."  He recognized in certain instances, speech can be a form of action. He also voted to allow the sterilization of a young Black woman who was said to be mentally deficient, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." 

But whatever fault you can find in their positions over their long lives, you know they each saw war, had post war careers which entailed difficult decisions based on their experience in the real world and they each knew what sacrifice and suffering meant.


Looking at our current batch of "leaders" one has to wonder how far we can get with these hot house flowers: Trump, Sessions, Cornyn, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Lindsay Graham. 
Where is the steel in their back bones?  
Where is the steel tempered by flame?

The Careful Craft of Lying

If ever there was a case of "those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it," it has to be the advent, over the past 2 years, of a politician, now leader, who has used a technique which was well described in the early 1930's and then applied through that and the next decade effectively. Faced with this "new" approach, current journalists and pundits have been befuddled, expressed astonishment at the success of a continuous stream of obvious lies. Everyone from Mark Shields, to Joe Bruni to Chris Cuomo have stared into the camera, or written with jaws dropped, flustered, as if well, this is just something we have never seen before. What do we do?

This well worn technique, which has gone by various descriptions, but most commonly called, "The Big Lie" was described in a paper written by anonymous Army bureaucrats in the middle of the last century:

The phrase was also used in a report prepared during the war by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing [his] psychological profile:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

--Wikipedia

The practitioner of this technique described the basis for it in his famous book, written while in prison:

"Thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.
For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."

If this sounds familiar, it should.
1. Never allow the public to cool off: Well, thank you Twitter. 
2. Never admit a fault: Check that box
3. Never leave room for alternatives:  Well, that nasty guy was a Muslim, so all Muslims...
4. If you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it. Crooked Hillary. Lock her up. Obama born in Kenya. Muslims coming to kill us. Mexican rapists. 
5. The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it: Little Marco, Pocahontas, Crooked Hillary.

The one departure is choosing one enemy at a time and blaming him for everything. In that our current Dotard has chosen a new path. He can pick a whole cast of characters to assail, and given the technology, he can keep a lot of balls up in the air.


If all this does not sound familiar,  then you haven't been paying attention.

Trump and Muslims: The Problem of the Exceptional Case

Some years ago at a discussion at the liberal River Road Unitarian Church, in Bethesda, Maryland a speaker decried the fact that although Blacks constituted only 12% of the population they were over 25% of those in jail.
Someone from the audience observed: "Yes, that's because they commit 25% of the crime. Their presence in prison reflects their behavior in society."

Of course, that is arguable. Many factors likely contribute to the high incarceration rates for minority races, including a judicial system which is rigged against them, poor legal representation, but one of the factors is their own behavior. Politically incorrect as that may be, it is likely the truth.


You can argue about why minorities commit more crime: their feeling it's the only option they have to achieve wealth--so poverty, under education, impoverished family structure, drive decisions to do crime,  but in the end, Blacks likely do commit a disproportionate amount of the robberies, murders, and  other such crimes. "Black crimes" as Chris Rock says, and so they wind up in prison.

Now we move to the guys with the beards (or in the case of the Boston Marathon bombers, without beards) who are young Muslim men who decide to go crazy.

Just a couple of normal looking Boston guys.

 If we have 3 million Muslims in this country and half are male and many of those are young males, we are talking about likely 750,000 young Muslim males and out of that group we'll get maybe a thousand who are watching ISIS videos and smouldering with resentment because the bouncy blonde cheerleaders at their high schools and colleges have no interest in them or even taunt them, so they consider going out and blowing up a marathon race or running their truck into some bicyclists. (The latest Islamic ISIS maniac wannabe is only 5 feet tall; you can imagine where his resentment began.)

Calmly planting a bomb to kill those kids.

So Trump bellows, "close the borders,"   but of course, that horse is already out of the barn.  The Uzbekistan malcontents are already here. Closing the borders would not have screened out the Boston Marathon bombers or this latest whack job in New York City.


So you are down to "round 'em up." 

And where does that leave us, when we identify a suspect population?
It leads, logically to American concentration camps, like the ones that once house Japanese Americans?

Oh, that was sweet. All those innocent, loyal, industrious, Japanese immigrants who had no affinity for the Emperor but were caught in America as more or less hostages.

That's what we are talking about: You are a member of this group. White, Christian Americans look at you and question your loyalty.

Of course these same White, Christian Americans do not look at the White guy who drove his truck into a crowd in Charlottesville and see him as part of a suspect group. 
That White guy was the exception case.
We are not Ku Klux Klan just because we are White Christians.
The President suggested there was wrong on both sides in Charlottesville. (Wrong on both sides of that fender? )
But when it comes to Muslims, well they are all suspect.

The Problem of Young Bearded Muslims

"Men in Black" has a wonderful scene in which Will Smith is being tested in a rapid fire challenge, where he has to make an instantaneous decision who to shoot in a dark alley at 3 AM and three images are flashed before him:  A monster from outer space hanging from a street light, a monster holding a Kleenex and a sweet looking 8 year old White girl holding books on quantum physics. He shoots the girl. Every other candidate shoots the monsters.  When asked why he shot the girl, Will says, "She is the one who had no business being in that alley at 3 AM. The other two are just minding business."

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=men+in+black+shoot+the+girl+selection+scene&view=detail&mid=90E43AEBDD614711059590E43AEBDD6147110595&FORM=VIRE

He thought contrarian and he was correct.

The fact is, we all profile. Walking down a dark street at night, if we are White, we don't cross to the other side if we see a white haired lady in a prim suit walking toward us; we cross if we are approached by a big Black guy or maybe by a guy with a beard and one of those Muslim hats. Everyone's a little bit racist, especially when afraid. 

Bearded Muslim

Following the New York City murderous spree by a young, bearded Muslim from Uzbekistan, the Dotard thundered we have to keep these European problems (i.e. Muslims) out of the country and we can't afford to be "politically correct," which meant we cannot afford to deny profiling is a safety measure. We all profile, based on race, ethnicity, fear.

Bearded Jew

While Chris Coumo and the entire array of anti Trump media have howled that 99.9% of all American Muslims are horrified by this terrorist attack and would never do any such thing, that this man was admitted to the country 5 years ago and only became radicalized once he was here, so no vetting could have identified him as a problem because we was not a problem then, he misses the point.

Ran Down Dozens in Charlottesville, VA Beardless

If someone is going to go on line and watch videos from ISIS, it's not going to be your Black inner city kid or your white grandma. It's going to be the bearded kid from Uzbekistan--or maybe he won't have a beard, but he's Muslim, like the Uzbekistan Boston Bombers.

I do not have the solution to what you do about terrorism, home grown, imported or otherwise. But Trump has a point which liberals have got to answer. If we have a community from which terrorists, some terrorists at least, have been visibly grown, we have to come up with a response which reassures the potential targets of these maniacs while preserving the ideal of diversity.

Bearded Terrorists White Supremicist Style: Boys will be Boys

It is no wonder that Trump relished the name of the immigration program, "Diversity Immigration."  See what diversity gets us?

Bearded Traitor

Of course, as we have seen, diversity enriches us, as it does in Brooklyn and throughout our country. It is the real strength of America, we look different; we may speak different languages at home, but when we go to work or get on the subway, we live and function harmoniously together.  We are the Starship Enterprise and this enterprise should go forth boldly where others fear to tread.

Bearded Liberator

But first we have to think of an answer to Trump's expostulations of fear and loathing.

Bearded Hero

The Addictive Joy of Shallow Pleasures: Twitter

My son warned me not to get into Twitter. Too addictive. 
Oh, I thought, that's a bit overwrought.

But then I saw its effects firsthand, in the person of my good friend, Obadiah Youngblood, who has recently started up a Twitter account and he now staggers around, face drained, pallid, unable to attend to the necessities of life. 

It's much like that Mark Twain story, "A Literary Nightmare: Punch Brothers Punch," in which the narrator learns a little ditty and cannot get it out of his mind until he passes it on to another person, who is then ensnared.

So it is with Twitter. Once you get the bug, apparently,  it's hard to get rid of it, to get off the site. The Tweet has consumed his days, and wrecked his nights. 

Poor Obadiah is a wreck. He's stopped painting, stopped eating, just sits in front of his computer all day firing off 140 characters at his favorite people. He has become obadiah youngblood@obadiahyoungbl and he is contained in that universe, unable to break free, trapped in a tar pit. 

He follows Donald Trump, who provides him with a steady stream of things to react to.
He likes David Simon, the creator of "The Wire" but has been disappointed at how Simon rants and sputters and curses Fox News and Trump in a surprisingly profane and unimaginative way.

Obadiah's work, when he was still able to work

Mostly, he responds to Trump, having no illusion that Trump will actually read his Tweets, but he is thrilled when others, people he has no connection with in any other way, press a button and a little red heart appears to indicate they liked his Tweet. 

He has found a community of Trump belittlers. 
He could have found the same thing on Redditt Progressive, a throng of ranting folks expostulating about the Constitutional crisis, expressing fear for the republic, decrying narcissism, nativism, racism, misogyny, boorishness, bloviating, all sorts of things contained in Trump. 

There is something salutary, however, about being able to respond to the verbal incontinence of the Chief Executive, more or less in real time, with others listening. What other President has allowed for so much more or less direct contact with the White House? 
Well, not really direct contact. It's a one way conversation, really. You feel you are replying, but he does not hear you. It's like talking to a TV screen.

It does consume the energy of the opposition, and it gives people a sense they are having an effect, a delusion, of course.

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders Tweet, but somehow, they seem impersonal, more rote.  Trump has the immediacy of the village fool. You can't take him seriously, but you know he believes whatever it is he is trying to say. His eruptions, "Fake News" and "Lying Democrats" are so empty of content, you have to believe they are at least, heart felt. 

Obadiah seems to think if he can just craft the absolute perfect response to a Trump Tweet, it will so puncture and deflate him, he will simply pop and collapse and vanish  from the scene, like the Judge in Roger Rabbit, who is consumed by the Dip. 

But, of course, you cannot deflate or shame or defeat the Pink Puffer. You are talking to someone who cannot hear you.

Taking a Knee vs Sieg Heil!

When Colin Kapernick took a knee at the playing of the national anthem at an NFL football game, he probably did not know that he was entering a Twilight Zone of principled resistance which dated back to early anti Nazi protests in American past.

2016

There were two Supreme Court cases which addressed the symbolic actions of citizens to protest a prevailing rule seeking to enforce patriotism on the citizens of this nation.

1968

The first case was the 1943 case West Virginia State Board of Education v Barnette, in which children were expelled from public school for refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag. These children were Jevovah's witnesses and they had been taught such a pledge spoken, or rather recited, before a flag was tantamount to violating the Biblical proscription from God against worshiping graven images.  Their father supported them right up to the Supreme Court.  

Justice Robert Jackson, who later served as the American lead prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials wrote a stinging opinion, reversing early decisions and rejecting Felix Frankfuter's dissent. Nobody in this country should be made to speak. The first amendment ensures not just the freedom to speak; it preserves the freedom to remain silent. 
"If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us."
Justice Robert Jackson
Remember 1943: America was in the midst of fighting a war against Nazi Germany, and for many across the land the practice which had been widely introduced of instructing school children to recite the pledge--and in those days, they not only recited the pledge but they stretched out one arm toward the flag--looked way too much like the Nazi practice of Seig Heil!  

American children: Seig Heil!

There followed a case in 1971, when the state of New Hampshire, in the midst of the way in Vietnam, decided to change it's state license plates to replace "Scenic New Hampshire" with "Live Free or Die," which prompted another Jehovah's witness to tape over the "Or Die" objecting this violated his religion. Others taped over the whole sentence, saying it was a subterfuge to force New Hampshire citizens to support the War, which supposedly, and arguably was being fought for "freedom."

Group think, the forced conformity of behavior and angry reactions to symbolic protests against symbolic conformity have been with us throughout our lifetimes. 
The American Olympic champions who raised their fist as Black Americans and bowed their heads as the American flag was raised and the anthem played were thrown out of the 1968 Olympics because in the face of the ultimate in jingoistic expression of "patriotism" their mute gesture spoke of their dismay at the way Blacks were treated in America, where they were still being lynched, denied mortgage loans by federal government agencies, beaten by police and drafted to fight in Vietnam, when, as Mohammad Ali said, they had no argument with them Viet Cong. We are all oppressed by the white man.

So now it's Trump and the white supremacists and the super patriots who think patriotism is a gesture, but President Heel Spurs, the commander in chief, does not think patriotism includes the willingness to resist injustice.